Steve Blank Quotes

The art of entrepreneurship and the science of Customer Development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. It's understanding who to listen to and why.

I think, when I see entrepreneurs, they tend to talk about the market and the industry - which is obviously very important, but the most important thing is you're product. What are you selling? And does it really have product-market fit?

If you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a company, I think the first thing you do is you go and talk to a bunch of people. But then the next thing you probably should do is figure out if there's a broader demand than just people you know. That's where I think SurveyMonkey is pretty valuable to people.

You can always change your branding or hire lawyers, but it's critical that you figure out if you have product market fit, and if you don't, figure out how to course-correct without getting stuck.

Customer Development changes almost every aspect of startup behavior, performance, metrics, and, as often as not, success potential.

I don't understand how you can have product-market fit and not a lot of people wanting your product. The two go hand-in-hand.

When you are starting to run an online business, you need to narrow down a niche market and be able to stick with it until you have a good profit coming in. This can take a while, so you need to have a great deal of patience to make sure that your business is moving in the right direction.

Tell your idea to whomever will listen, and you'll get valuable market feedback before writing a single line of code.

Young entrepreneurs should spend an awful lot of time thinking about what they want to go into.

The problem with entrepreneurship is we are often working really hard producing high quality products that no-one wants. The creation of stuff is not valued.

Every entrepreneur needs ideas, vision, and creativity - no matter what the product or service. Not only that, but the product should truly delight customers and become an essential part of their lives.

The thing about startups is you can make it, and if it's wrong you can remake it, and you can build a team that you want to have, a product that you want to have. You're utterly focused on your users or your customers and their needs, and trying to figure out how to meet those needs.

Go find out if you can make your product. Once you make it, stop projecting what's going to happen and go find out whether your product can sell. Find out whether someone is willing to take hard-earned cash out of their pocket and exchange it for your product.

Wherever we are seeing something getting used, that to us is an early indicator that there might be something that people want. And then let's figure out how to make that great. And then let's go figure out monetization.

In my view, product/market fit is the most important thing to get right as a startup entrepreneur. There's a variety of ways to do it, but without solving some pain point that the customer gets so excited about they tell their friends, it's really hard in the modern age to get any liftoff.

Don't spend months building something without any idea if someone actually wants it.

Business plans are the tool existing companies use for execution. They are the wrong tool to search for a business model.

When talking to first-time entrepreneurs, I often ask them: 'How do you know that people want your product or service?' As you can expect, the answer is often that they don't yet, but will know once they launch. And they're right. That's why it's critical to launch as quickly as possible so you can get that feedback.

Most entrepreneurs don't need as many customers as they think. A lot of people think 10 is too few for a sample. But if all 10 refused a product, why is that not enough? If you want 100, 1,000 or a million customers, you first have to get 10.

One of the top causes of startup death - right after cofounder problems - is building something no one wants.

Auctomatic was a compressed start-up experience, going from start to launch to acquisition in under a year. We spent a long time building the product before getting our first customer, whereas with Stripe we made sure we had paying customers from the very start.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world - if you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it's so easy to sell your product to the world.

After building most of Mint.com's prototype by myself, I talked to anyone and everyone I knew about Mint. It's counter-intuitive, because you might fear someone will steal your idea, but it's the only way to make connections, be sure you're on the right track, and provide a solution for an audience broader than yourself.

Most of all, I discovered that in order to succeed with a product you must truly get to know your customers and build something for them.